Icehouses

Ice cream wasn’t a privilege only for city dwellers. Ice creams were also made in the large country houses, which had icehouses built in the gardens of their estate as early as the seventeenth century. James I is attributed with ordering the building of the first icehouse in Britain in Greenwich Park. Icehouses have been known from the Romans, the ancient Greeks and even as far back as Mesopotamian civilisation. A clay tablet from around 1780 BCE records the foundation of an icehouse in Terqa, a city on the banks of the middle Euphrates.